Date: March 18, 2009
Location: N84° 3.749' W074 12.159'
Time Traveled: 9 hours
Distance Traveled: 6.9 nautical miles
AM Temperature: -38°F
PM Temperature: -26°F
Wind: light in the AM, grew stronger
Visibility: great in the AM, grew worse, light snow in PM
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Hello. This is the update for March 18th. It is day 17 of the expedition. Our day began with wonderful visibility. I stood high on a mound of ice and looked to the north and I was able to see very far, which basically means that the terrain was flat. The further we could see, the flatter the terrain and we like that because it means that we'll be able to go faster. So I was able to do that and see a great distance and I watched John pull away with his two pulks.
Eventually I left and somewhere through the day we crossed 84°. There was no sign, no marker, no boundary, nobody to tell us that we had done it, but we just knew that we had been traveling fast enough and that we had done it and we were very happy about that.
Shortly thereafter, the visibility steadily decreased and eventually the sun was gone and it was very hard to make out all the ups and downs in the terrain. Even though daylight has increased by an average of, we think, about 45 minutes every day, you still need the sunlight itself for the contrasts in the terrain. So the going was much, much slower. Incidentally, according to our GPS, we now have just over 12 hours of daylight from sunrise to sunset. But because we are so far north, there's actually, if you wake up in the middle of the night, there is still a little light in the sky.
